FWA (fixed wireless access) has been around well over a decade but with 4G, the bandwidth offered has not been competitive with most cable and DSL-based offerings, never mind fiber-to-the-home (FTTH).
That is changing with 5G and some operators have been quick off the draw to start FWA rolling and establish where it makes most sense economically. Among such early movers is Verizon, which first pushed into 5G commercial services carrying the FWA tag in late 2018, with services in millimeter wave spectrum launched in parts of the cities o of Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento. Since then it has extended the service to some other urban areas, including Detroit just this month.
A key difference now is that Verizon has eliminated the dreaded engineer’s visit and made its FWA service self-installable, through a router that also supports WiFi 6, as well as having a voice assistant built in. Consumers can just plug the router in and follow quite straightforward instructions to switch on, with customer contact limited to online, instant messaging, social media, or telephone support if necessary.
Another change is that, while that initial roll-out used Verizon’s Technical Forum 5G specifications – a pre-standard implementation developed inhouse with a group of vendors – the latest deployments have switched to the full 3GPP New Radio (NR) standard. Verizon says the older installations are being upgraded to NR. The operator
also says that demand for its 5G Home kit has rocketed during the Covid-19 crisis and that it would have liked to have had it available more widely for sale at this time. The service is also available for businesses as 5G Office, but that has been enjoying less traction during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Verizon has been outlining how FWA has come to be seen as a separate opportunity from the traditional play for mobility, exploiting the relatively low cost-per-home-passed compared with a fiber-based option, which requires digging of trenches for the last stretch.
We do need to issue some caveats though. The first point is that the only difference between an FWA and mobile offering is the presence of a router in the customer premises to serve connected devices – over WiFi in most cases. The fact the router does not move is immaterial to the service provisioning.
More to the point is that the business case will vary greatly with the location and will not always be there. It is true FWA avoids the need for fiber but in dense urban environments the small cells themselves will need some sort of backhaul or fronthaul. That may in turn be over fiber, so it is not true to say there is no marginal cost involved scaling up FWA.
And while FTTH capex is higher than wireless alternatives, the latter often carry heavier operating costs over their lifetime, as radio networks require more frequent maintenance and upgrade then fiber.
At the same time, either FTTH or fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) are more cost-effective in urban environments where streets can be cabled in single operations serving a significant number of homes and requiring just a final drop of perhaps 10 or 20 meters (copper in the case of FTTC), to reach the CPE gateway or router. In such cases, fiber might cost no more than FWA and provide greater capacity at higher availability.
So FWA will come into its own in sparser environments that will still include some urban or suburban settings, enabling us to identify three primary opportunities:
- To fill in coverage gaps where the wired options are not available, or in the case of DSL sometimes too far from a DSLAM for adequate speeds
- To compete with the wired options where it is more cost effective
- In developing regions where fixed broadband coverage is patchy or non-existent.
Verizon is targeting mainly the second of these opportunities, with perhaps a bit of the first. But it is the third opportunity, in developing markets in particular, that promises to have the greatest economic and social benefits for users.
In fact, given the paucity of copper-based broadband in many such areas and poor performance where it exists, FWA has been deployed in some areas since 2006, back in the 3G era. This has led FWA to account for over 50% of broadband connections in Bangladesh and a number of sub-Sahara African countries, including Ghana and Uganda, while in Nigeria it is approaching 90% by some counts, with operators such as MTN and Vodafone in the vanguard. Some connections are 3G or 4G, usually in TDD mode, while others use legacy technologies like WiMAX, or proprietary broadband wireless systems.
But such FWA services have often struggled to meet even the rather more modest performance targets in those regions and now 5G is opening the door to more innovative approaches optimized for those markets.
Among the pioneers were UK-based Cambridge Broadband Networks (CBNL), which collapsed in May, with a point-to-multipoint, approach for deployment of mmWave specifically for FWA. Its African businesses may find a buyer, and other companies are also active in offering solutions – based on cellular, souped-up WiFi or proprietary technologies – that suit the economics of regions where ARPUs are chronically low. Such technologies can give operators an incentive to invest in covering sparsely populated or remote areas, and especially suburban environments, because the upfront cost per subscriber is lower and ROI period is shorter, and they may also provide a bridge to the day when 5G-based FWA can be deployed as broadly and cost-effectively as required.